NPR: In Japan, Vice President Pence Pushes For Bilateral Trade Deal: it seems our VP has run into a brick wall that is easy to see, I have drawn many cartoons about this matter. The US has run this trade deficit with Japan all my long life. And it adds up! And more: we defend Japan at great personal cost, too. And worse: Japan is literally dying. They are no longer reproducing much in the way of children, the people are perpetually poor and nothing changes, it is constant home depression and super rich for the super rich who fly above all this. And it is bad for Americans.

The VP Pence went to Tokyo to get the usual runaround.

Trade was also a major topic of conversation. The initiation of new talks with Japan is meant, at least in part, to take the place of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, The Associated Press reports.

President Trump campaigned against the TPP, a long-negotiated multilateral trade deal that former President Barack Obama supported. Soon after Trump took office, he pulled the U.S. out of the TPP — which needed all the signatory nations to ratify the deal.

From my cartoon in 2007. Nothing has changed over the years. The entire point of ‘trade’ with the US is to buy raw materials and sell manufactured goods thus, the ‘value added’ remains in Japanese hands.

Taro Aso, who heads Japan for a newly-created bilateral economic dialogue with the United States, said that under TPP, Japan was able to accede to more U.S. demands as it could make up for the losses through agreements with other countries.

“In a bilateral deal, you can’t do that. You can’t get back what you lose from a compromise with the United States,” Aso said in a seminar at Columbia University on Wednesday.

HAHAHA. So far, the ‘loser’ is the USA. Not Japan!

Over a decade ago, I did this cartoon about our ‘trade’ with Asia. We gain nothing from ‘trade’. Worse, we replicated this with China, a hostile major nuclear power.

While domestic demand has remained lackluster, exports have lifted industrial production in recent months. Japan posted its first trade surplus in six years in 2016 thanks to a rebound in exports late in the year, though uncertainties over U.S. policy under U.S. President Donald Trump and over China’s recovery persist.

Japan’s trade deficit isn’t with the US, they always run a surplus. It is other countries that sell raw materials and don’t buy Japanese that is the problem for Japan.

The 7.23 trillion yen ($66 billion) in exports and 6.61 trillion yen ($60 billion) in imports resulted in a trade surplus of 614.7 billion yen ($5.6 billion), down 17.5% from a year before.

A revival of demand in China helped push exports up 16.4% from the year before to 1.3 trillion yen ($11 billion). But the increase was exaggerated by the timing of lunar new year holidays, which varies from year to year.

Higher oil prices boosted imports from Middle Eastern countries by more than 45 percent, including a 75% jump in imports from Saudi Arabia.

In fact, prices accounted for a large share, 12.5% year-on-year, of the increase in imports, said Marcel Thieliant of Capital Economics. Export prices rose only by 3.7%, while export volumes were up 6.6%, he said.

Yes, the cost of energy and oil is killing Japan. Remember the tsunami? That destroyed Fukushima and shut down the other nuclear power plants. A huge hit in the energy sector.

Japan tries to make up for all this via a trade surplus with the US which is what Trump wants to fix. Another huge bite that the globalists won’t allow him to succeed. The EU doesn’t want this, either, for the same reasons. Japan Frets About Spreading Chinese Monetary Power is a story from 2007 that explains everything especially how the old guard in Japan plays the same old tricks over and over again until everything collapses around their silly heads and no one seems able to stop this…sounds like the US…sadly.

Obviously, no one in our own ‘old guard’ in DC, that is, Congress and the political parties, has the faintest idea what the trade deficit is doing to us all, especially US labor. But then, this stupidity is going on so long, it is ‘normal’ to these clowns.

20 responses to “VP Pence Visit To Japan A Total Failure, Aso Pissed Off At Attempt At Reducing US Trade Deficits”

Easy to fix. Just kick off a war between North Korea and Japan and South Korea. Whole area turns to ash and the US gets a whole new sector of industry to build up to replace the Japanese and South Korean output.

Compare and contrast if you will the treatment and US reaction to Japan’s Aso (who is obviously an A##hole! HAHA) and Syria’s Assad. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be that Japan ‘owns’ a lot of US debt? So it is bloodthirsty warmongering when it comes to the Assad’s of the world and it is humiliating scolding from the likes of Japan. It’s curios to me because the US could tee it up and play hardball with Japan if it wanted to. The US could tell Japan, “We will no longer protect you militarily from the Chinese.” That one would seem to work well, especially now with things like the Spratly Islands increasing overall tensions in the Pacific theater. Sometimes it is revealing to see what does NOT happen instead of what does happen. And if you think the Laps are rude to the US neo con warmongers, you aint seen nothing yet! Wait until the Chinese decide to put the US Corporate State in its place.

Sounds about right. Anywhere within 100 miles of a military base will be top of the list.

Which includes us here in Texas, several huge military bases, including Ft Hood, possibly the largest one on the continent. If it’s really WWIII, they’ll have to fry the military bases. The ones in Japan and Europe as well.

I doubt that the Russians want it to be any colder there than it already is.

But they realize that the crazies have taken over here in America, and they have plans. The military always has plans for everything. Logically, these would include plans to vaporize all military bases . . . of course, I do not have access to any of these plans. I am just making an educated guess.

Our best hope of avoiding nuclear winter is for common sense to prevail at some level in the military hierarchies, and for them to ignore or delay orders to launch. There’s that, and the hope that maintenance has been as slipshod on the nuke weapons as it has been on the hydroelectric dams. Nukes require care and feeding to continue to work, and it has been several decades for them.

So far, I don’t have a lot of hope. Like Elaine says, Texas will fry along with both coasts. Some rural areas in the far west may escape.

About nuclear radiation: evolution will simply pick up its pace. It has done so many times in the past due to all sorts of toxic events. Anyone looking at the fossil record notices the abrupt changes in genetic conditions.